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Current Changes in English Syntax

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Current Changes in English Syntax 1 Current changes in English syntax Christian Mair and Geoffrey Leech 1. Introduction Syntactic change differs from lexical change in at least two important ways. First, it generally unfolds much more slowly, sometimes taking hundreds of years to run its course to completion, and secondly, it tends to proceed below the threshold of speakers' conscious awareness, which makes impressionistic or introspection-based statements on ongoing changes in English grammar notoriously unreliable. A third difficulty in pinning down syntactic change in present-day English is that a rather small number of alleged syntactic innovations are strongly stigmatised. This has biased discussion in favour of such high-profile issues at the expense of developments which are, arguably, more comprehensive and far- reaching in the long run. Examples which come to mind include the use of like as a conjunction (as in And it looks like we could even lose John) or the use of hopefully as a sentence adverb (Hopefully, they'll go back and set it up).1 Such shibboleths have aroused an inordinate amount of expert and lay comment, while developments which appear to be systematically if gradually transforming the grammatical core of standard English, such as the continuing increase in the frequency of the progressive aspect or the spread of gerundial complements at the expense of infinitival ones (see section 4 below), tend to go largely unnoticed. We define "current" changes in English as those developments for which there has been a major diachronic dynamic since the beginning of the 20th century. For practical reasons, we focus largely on the written standard forms of English in Britain and the United States, fully aware that this strategy will prevent us from including some cutting-edge innovations in 1 It is only the second case which represents a genuine innovation – with a first OED attestation from 1932 (s.v. hopefully, adv. 2); the use of like as a conjunction can be documented from the Early Modern English period 2 contemporary spoken English which are likely to be incorporated into the standard in the long run. When it comes to analysing syntactic change, there are two approaches. Where the focus is on the diachronic development of grammars as decontextualised linguistic systems, syntactic change is often seen as an abrupt or discrete alteration of structures, rules and constraints (e.g. in the generativist tradition embodied in the work of David Lightfoot – from Lightfoot, 1979 to Lightfoot, 1999). But where the starting point for the analysis of historical change is the study of recorded performance data in their linguistic and social context – as, for example, in grammaticalisation theory (Hopper/ Traugott, 2003) or the budding field of historical sociolinguistics (cf. Nevalainen/ Raumolin-Brunberg, 2003) – the picture that emerges is one of gradual evolution rather than abrupt change. Syntactic changes are seen as embedded in a context where semantic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic factors assume roles as determinants of change. However, even those scholars who conceive of syntactic change in terms of discrete steps will agree that the spread of linguistic innovations throughout the community (or conversely, the dying out of obsolescent forms) is a gradual phenomenon. It is understandable, then, that in the time-span of the one century that is the focus of this chapter, we are unlikely to see any one change run out its full course, from inception in particular genres, registers or discourse communities, to full establishment in the core standard grammar. What we are able to note, though, are shifting frequencies of use for competing variants which – over the course of a century – may well build up into impressive statistical trends. Not only will a change proceed gradually (if one looks at the language as a whole), but it will also proceed at differential speeds in different regional varieties of English and different styles and textual genres. This is why, after a necessarily brief review of the literature on ongoing grammatical change in present-day English, the present chapter will largely be corpus-based, onwards, and the only new thing about it in the 20th century is that it is losing the stigma attaching to it in the 3 focusing on the examination of substantial samples of different varieties of writing at different times. As a point of departure we will take mid-twentieth-century standard American and British written English as documented in two widely known and widely used matching reference corpora, namely the Brown and LOB corpora. To cover developments towards the end of the twentieth century, we will also use the Frown and F-LOB corpora, which were built to match Brown and LOB as closely as possible in size and composition but contain texts published not in 1961, as the originals do, but in 1992 and 1991 respectively.2 The four equivalent corpora are available in untagged and tagged versions,3 making it feasible to study changes in textual frequency in terms of not only individual words and word sequences but also of grammatical categories.4 Beyond the limitations of the written medium and the thirty- year period spanned by these corpora, we will where necessary extend our evidential base by making use of other electronic text resources, such as small collections of spoken data5 and the corpus formed from OED quotations. 2. Some important previous studies The popular literature on ongoing changes in the English language (see Barber, 1964 or Potter, 1975 for two typical examples) tends to focus on phonetic and lexical rather than eyes of many writers. 2 The four corpora each contain about a million words of running text, sampled in 500 chunks of c. 2,000 words each and covering a range of fifteen written genres. They are available from ICAME, the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English, in Bergen, Norway, whose homepage contains further relevant information. See http://www.hit.uib.no/corpora.html. 3 By a tagged corpus, we mean a corpus in which each word token is supplied with a grammatical label specifying its part of speech – see Mair et al. (2002) for further details. 4 Much of the corpus-based research reported here, particularly that based on the LOB, F-LOB, Brown and Frown corpora, has been carried out collaboratively by the authors, their colleagues and researchers at the Universities of Freiburg and Lancaster. Regarding the Lancaster work, thanks are due to Nicholas Smith, who undertook most of the automatic corpus processing and a considerable amount of the manual analysis. We also gratefully acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Board and the British Academy (Leech) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Mair), who provided research funding. 5 See note 10 for further details of the spoken corpora used. Corpus-based real-time studies of changes in the grammar of the spoken language will be encouraged by the creation of "a parsed and searchable diachronic 4 grammatical change. Among grammatical changes the emphasis is on cases which have aroused the concern of prescriptivists. A typical list of changes suspected to be going on in present-day standard English is the following one, which is largely based on Barber (1964, p. 130-144): a. a tendency to regularise irregular morphology (e.g. dreamt Æ dreamed) b. revival of the "mandative" subjunctive, probably inspired by formal US usage (we demand that she take part in the meeting) c. elimination of shall as a future marker in the first person d. development of new, auxiliary-like uses of certain lexical verbs (e.g. get, want – cf., e.g., The way you look, you wanna / want to see a doctor soon)6 e. extension of the progressive to new constructions, e.g. modal, present perfect and past perfect passive progressive (the road would not be being built/ has not been being built/ had not been being built before the general elections) f. increase in the number and types of multi-word verbs (phrasal verbs, have/take/give a ride, etc.) g. placement of frequency adverbs before auxiliary verbs (even if no emphasis is intended – I never have said so) h. do-support for have (have you any money? and no, I haven't any money Æ do you have/ have you got any money? and no, I don't have any money/ haven't got any money) i. demise of the inflected form whom j. increasing use of less instead of fewer with countable nouns (e.g. less people) k. spread of the s-genitive to non-human nouns (the book's cover) corpus of present-day spoken English", which is under way at the Survey of English Usage (University College London); see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/diachronic.index.htm for details. 6 While it is not referred to as such in the literature aimed at wider audiences, this is an obvious case of grammaticalisation: the gradual incorporation of lexical material into the grammar of the language. 5 l. omission of the definite article in certain environments (e.g. renowned Nobel laureate Derek Walcott) m. "singular" they (everybody came in their car) n. like, same as, and immediately used as conjunctions o. a tendency towards analytical comparatives and superlatives (politer Æ more polite) Of these, a-h belong to the sphere of the verb phrase, while i-m belong to the sphere of the noun phrase (n-o belong to neither). Certain of these supposed changes do have support from corpus evidence – b, c, d, e, h, i, l, m – although in some cases the focus of change as listed above is misleading. Thus shall (item c) has been undergoing a general decline, not restricted to the first person.
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